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OPINION

Ryan leaves Congress worse off; our loss, his kids' gain

Wichita
Published 11:02 a.m. CT April 13, 2018

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House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., announces that he will not run for re-election at the end of his term, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)(Photo: Jacquelyn Martin, AP)

Paul Ryan was always the thoughtful, likable conservative, and it didn’t hurt that he was young and ripped. Now he’s just another Republican House speaker who couldn’t figure out how to do his job — or decided it was too hard.

“I have given this job everything I have,” Ryan said in announcing Wednesday that he would not run for re-election this fall. It wasn’t enough.

There’s no denying Ryan faced tough circumstances. His predecessor, John Boehner, walked away in the middle of his term after failing to corral a party deeply divided between its suburban moderates and increasingly forceful conservatives.

Neither Boehner nor Ryan was ever able to get those conservatives to accept that compromise, whether with their own party's moderates or Democrats, is essential both to governing and to advancing their own cause.

While Boehner faced a president of the opposing party, Ryan had the complication of President Trump, a man who reshaped the Republican Party in ways that contradict the speaker's long-held principles on trade and other issues. Trump is now synonymous with the GOP, in part because if Ryan resisted the transformation, it was hard to tell.

It didn't have to be that way. There was a time when Ryan himself, now 48, was considered to be next-generation presidential timber. “Paul Ryan is a leader. His leadership begins with character and values,” 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said when he picked Ryan as his running mate. “With energy and vision, Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party.”

The sky was the limit. But the sky has fallen, at least for now, on Ryan’s political prospects even as Romney appears headed for the Senate from Utah and a similar reckoning on whether to go along with Trump or take him on.

Ryan abandons his party at an inopportune time. Respect for the character, values and intellectual leadership that Romney heralded as Ryan's selling points are at an all-time low among many Republicans. That's much to the detriment of both the Wisconsin congressman and his party's future viability.

He is now a lame duck not only as speaker but also as a fundraiser for a GOP on the ropes. He knows as well as anyone that Republicans desperately need cash to offset Democrats’ ferocious desire to vote them out in November.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to expect a self-styled budget wonk to stand up to the reality TV-honed charisma of America's first social media president. Nevertheless, America needed Ryan to rise to the moment, to lead his party and above all his country in defense of principles challenged by a plutocratic populist devoid of respect for the rule of law, basic facts and competent government.

America needed a leader who championed special counsel Robert Mueller, not just with words but also with legislation to protect his search for the truth on Trump and Russia. A leader who went against some in his party to allow votes on bipartisan health care and immigration deals. Above all, a leader who used his position to be the constructive and upstanding conservative counterweight to Trump.

Now Ryan is going home so he can be more than a weekend dad. He says he has accomplished much of what he had hoped to do in Washington. If that includes a legacy of massive deficits, a looming trade war, a paralyzed Congress and a party now fully identified with an erratic, ill-informed, ethically challenged president, he’s right.